* Posts by Alex

47 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2006

Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 delivers decent alternative to Adobe

Alex
Alien

No go...

Silverlight or Flash doesn't run on my ZX81 - I mean - come on !!!!

Open source closes gap on Microsoft's next Silverlight

Alex

ITV

The silverlight player with ITV for Windows OS's is rubbish as well.... you aren't missing anything.

I don't think they have the server power to cope with demand.

Alex
Stop

Open Source Headline?

Will people here please stop thinking that Open Source projects always = Linux.

This is not true !!!

Open source can run on a Windows server.

Check out http://www.dotnetnuke.com - a very successful open source framework based on .NET. it's about time this project got some more publicity from the Reg.... please broaden your minds. Just because it runs on MS software it does not mean it isn't Open Source or somehow contaminated!

Just because the base layer might not be open source, it doesn't mean that projects running above this layer aren't open source....!

The headline should have been "Linux closes gap on Microsoft's next Silverlight".

Many thanks...

Windows 7 and the Linux lesson

Alex
Thumb Down

1 week release candidate

Ubuntu should have had the release candidate up for testing for at least a month... how could they get decent feedback from their users from within a week?

Register readers on software development

Alex
Alert

Nice survey but lots of red herrings?

C and C# should have been separated. In fact with MS and .NET framework it's pretty much irrelevant which language you are using.... it's all about CLR. The conversation should be about what platform people are using that's all.

Can somebody tell me what "Enhancement of web presence" actually means?". That's what marketing people say, and let's face it many small business are run by marketing depts and hold the IT dept by remote control (generally make 'em crash into walls).

So who isn't going to enhance their web presence?... should this be compared with all the other stuff like Web2 etc? Developing web2 - is that not an enhancement? Where was the option that they are NOT going to enhance their web presence? Maybe I'm just being dumb, if somebody can explain this I'm all ears.

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time

Alex
Paris Hilton

Unbalanced - no real discussion...

Silly unbalanced article, open source applies to certain things better than others... why wasn't that even given a look in? There are grey areas that are far more interesting to discuss in these forums..

After the terrible Vista a lot of people are considering Linux,. nb I use Windows XP, I'll probably wait for Windows 7.... but I do GET both sides of the argument.

Battlestar Galactica prequel shuns space, spaceships

Alex
Flame

Timewarp...

This is really old news, months old. Did this get reported on the BBC website today or something? I look forward to find out who was elected President of the USA next week.

Thanks.

Alex
Boffin

Terminator 6

BTW isn't this a Terminator Sarah Connor TV series clone ?

Boris cans congestion extension

Alex
Stop

THE BIG QUESTION - Will the Camera stay?

Let's it it gets scrapped 2010, is anybody asking if they are going to find a "Use" for these camera afterwards (i.e. "National Security"), or are they gonna take them down (because sat technology is now already doing the job for them perfectly well right now).

Reg readers in Firefox 3 lovefest

Alex
Stop

IE6

> Coding for IE6 is not enjoyable

Ummm you missed out IE7 as well here. Get rid of that as well.

Boy band sings praises of Windows 7

Alex
Dead Vulture

Marmite?

Why are they selling Windows like Marmite? i.e. You hate it but you love it... hmmm....

The advertising agency needs to be sacked, they have no idea of the customer profiles in any MS market sector.

Internet Explorer - now with 35% less FAIL

Alex
Happy

Acid??

Where's the acid test score?

1&1 botches Microsoft Exchange update

Alex
Pirate

1&1 terrible

Are simply terrible.... it's obvious it's a joke.

Those who say they are happy with them:

a) Have never hosted with any other company so don't know how much better it could be

b) Have never rang them

c) Probably only have a few static html pages up on the web

d) Are related somehow with 1&1

e) Have never left them, then been billed 12 months later for a service they no longer have.

For the rest of us, they are impossible.

Apple is Fisher-Price of sound quality, says Neil Young

Alex
Jobs Horns

IPOD users are t*ssers

I challenge anybody to listen to dark side of the moon in MP3 format. The Hammond organ sounds like it's on full spin cycle.

Who wants to listen to portable music anyway? We have the radio, the trees, the birds and the bees. Plus if you do stick wires in your ears you are more likely to be run over or mugged.

Dangerous mobe chargers flood UK

Alex
Flame

Mobe?

Excuse me, but isn't "mobe" a banned word on this website?

If not, it should be....

MS DNS patch snuffs net connection for ZoneAlarm users

Alex
Thumb Down

Countersoft

ZoneAlarm's support drives me around the bend.

There is an issue with ZoneAlarm whereby if ad blocking and cookie control is set, any web applications on your local machine won't work. This has been going on for years and years and is a pain in the neck for developers.

Their "log a call" support recognises the issue, but won't acknowledge it in public as a "known issue", stating the developers will "fix it when they will fix it". Yeah right, years later still nothing has happened. I logged the issue two years ago and again a month ago.

I tried posting on their forums about this issue, and they DELETED the post, YES you heard me right. There was nothing nasty about the post other than the fact I said the bug had been going on for years.

There are lots of other posts on ZoneAlarms forums that seem to point to this issue as well....

Alex

Virgin Media ads throttled by peak time bandwidth squeeze

Alex
Pirate

Virgin no longer innocent..

Why are we still talking about Virgin?

Surely all the customers must have left by now and there would be no story?

I mean... who the hell would want to stay? They make AOL look good....

An ex-virgin customer....

Firefox 3: now available bug-free, say devs

Alex
Gates Horns

Oh really?

> If you really understand Windows....

Laughable comment, based on seriously flawed and incorrect assumptions. I suggest you contact Netscapes lawyers....

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

Alex
Paris Hilton

Why are virgin customers complaining...?

Just leave as soon as possible!

I was a dedicated customer of virgin for many years, they were good, now they are crap...and they get getting worse...

Move on.... follow my example...

Russell T Davies bows out of Doctor Who

Alex
Boffin

And the answer is....

I want my alien! (I live very near to gillian anderson so I want to torment her). Failing that I'll have a register T-shirt or mug... Or maybe you can give me the website for probing purposes :).

Quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS

The TARDIS wardrobe from "The Christmas Invasion".Once through the doors of the police box, the TARDIS interior has a vast number of rooms and corridors. The exact dimensions of the interior have not been specified, but apart from living quarters, the interior includes an art gallery (which is actually an ancillary power station), a bathroom with a swimming pool, a medical bay, and several brick-walled storage areas (all seen in The Invasion of Time, 1978). Portions of the TARDIS can also be isolated or reconfigured; the Doctor was able to jettison 25% of the TARDIS's structure in Castrovalva to provide additional "thrust".

Despite a widespread assumption that the interior of the TARDIS is infinite, there are indications that it is not. In Full Circle (1980), Romana stated that the weight of the TARDIS in Alzarius' Earth-like gravity was 5 × 106 kilograms (5000 tonnes). This presumably refers to its internal weight, as the external part of the TARDIS is light enough for it to be lifted or otherwise moved with relative ease (although most real police boxes were concrete and hence quite difficult to move): several men lift it up in Marco Polo, a group of small blue maintenance workers on Platform One push it along the ground in "The End of the World", and a quartet of Weeping Angels are able to rock it back and forth in "Blink", to name a few. If the exterior of the TARDIS is moved, the movement is transmitted to its interior.

In the tie-in novels, the interior of the TARDIS has been known to contain an entire city (Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible), used to encompass an entire parallel Earth (Blood Heat), and is big enough to dwarf Gallifrey itself when turned inside out (The Ancestor Cell). It is also seen to exist in multiple timelines.

A distinctive architectural feature of the TARDIS interior is the "roundel". In the context of the TARDIS, a roundel is a circular decoration that adorns the walls of the rooms and corridors of the TARDIS, including the console room. Some roundels conceal TARDIS circuitry and devices, as seen in the serials The Wheel in Space (1968), Logopolis, Castrovalva (1981), Arc of Infinity (1983), Terminus (1983), and Attack of the Cybermen (1985). The design of the roundels has varied throughout the show's history, from a basic circular cut-out with black background to a photographic image printed on wall board, to translucent illuminated discs in later serials. In the secondary console room, most of the roundels were executed in recessed wood panelling, with a few decorative ones in what appeared to be stained glass. In the new series, the roundels are built into hexagonal recesses in the walls of the new console room.

Other rooms seen include living quarters for many of the Doctor's companions, although the Doctor's own bedroom has never been mentioned or seen. The TARDIS also had a "Zero Room" — a chamber that was shielded from the rest of the universe and provided a restful environment for the Fifth Doctor to recover from his regeneration in Castrovalva — which was among the 25% jettisoned. However, the Seventh Doctor spin-off novel Deceit indicated that the Doctor rebuilt the Zero Room shortly before the events of that novel. In some of the First Doctor serials, a nearby room contains a machine that dispenses food or nutrition bars to the Doctor and his companions. This machine disappears after the first few serials, although mention is occasionally made of the TARDIS kitchen.

Although the interior corridors were not seen in the 2005 series, the fact that they still exist was established in "The Unquiet Dead", when the Doctor gives Rose some very complicated directions to the TARDIS wardrobe. The wardrobe is mentioned several times in the original series and spin-off fiction, and seen in The Androids of Tara (1978), The Twin Dilemma (1984) and Time and the Rani (1987). The redesigned version, from which the Tenth Doctor chooses his new clothes, was seen in "The Christmas Invasion" (2005) as a large multi-levelled room with a spiral

staircase. Designer Ed Thomas has suggested that more rooms may be seen in coming episodes.[16] The Doctor also mentions in "The Shakespeare Code" that the TARDIS has an attic.

------------

No mention about seats, I know the one at the BBC doesn't have any.

Son of 419 victim contacts El Reg

Alex
Alert

Oh my god...

I just read this article... Now I want to kill myself. Please don't send any money... you couldn't afford it.

MS whips lens cap off WorldWide Telescope

Alex
Gates Halo

Years back....

People would attempt to fix the issue before they reviewed a product....

Works fine.

Windows XP SP3 leaps into the tubes

Alex
Gates Halo

Works for me...

System more responsive. No issues

Looking at the comments I am guessing a lot of people are stopping their installs thinking their machine is frozen or doing nothing, rather than be patient until the process is complete.

MS should have put a few more progress bars in for good measure, esp after the reboot.

Sage sees flat US market

Alex
Alert

Sage

The Sage Line 50 appliation, and associated satilite applications, still cannot install itself properly on locked down Windows XP installations. You have to loosen up your locked down XP to install it. I suspect with Vista it's worse.

For a product that's been around for so long, not understanding where to place files and registry entries for optimal security is unforgivable, esp when you consider it's financial software.

If they are not careful they will see the same thing that happened to Quark Express, being taken over by a rival package (InDesign).

Glad MS are keeping them on their toes, they have been too lazy with their monopoly.

MS pulls plugs on XP SP3 mass launch

Alex
Linux

ZX81 SP1

My ZX81 runs great.. I don't need service packs or anything. I don't need a 56K modem. 3D monster maze runs fine and does not crash....

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

Alex

Can't wait for the disposable PC

...running Windows Vista of course

Switch on PC, watch it grind, crash, then throw in landfill....

and of course it can be recycled, as can everything! The great thing is that the amount of petrol and resources it takes to do so (e.g. transportation etc) means it benefits recycling companies pockets (and not the planet )...

The only things that are worth recycling are cans and bottles. Period. Other materials should be buried in fully sealed landfill sites, stick a pipe in it, and the methane given off should be used to produce power.

No sense of humour? Avoid Bootnotes

Alex
Flame

Oh bugger

I filtered out that category and now all I've got is recycled BBC news stories :).

Local council uses snooping laws to spy on three-year-old

Alex
Paris Hilton

Hold on a second...

First reaction is... what the hell are they doing? Well over the top!

...but then...

What exactly then is a council suppost to do then if it suspects fraud? Ignore it? Sit on their arses?

Suggestions please?

Polish builder sacked for humping hoover

Alex
Joke

Suckers!

You-tube goes mobile (the pleasure is all yours :).

Quake rocks Britain

Alex

London!

I felt a similar quake coming from or around Wales (if my memory serves me right) a couple of years ago. Didn't last long, I heard a crack sound in the ceiling, and it took me a few minutes to fathom what happened, and I concluded that this looks like a quake, I went straight to an internet chat room and asked if anybody had experienced the same thing, pretty much everybody was asking what happened. Woke up the next day, after hearing the news, and it seemed most people I knew slept through it.

Last summer we had a typhoon nearby, I saw hail and a big gust of wind, followed by very clear weather, I saw no typhoon, but I guessed the conditions would be right... I mentioned it to somebody a few hours later and somebody said a whole road had been destroyed by a typhoon,a couple of miles away.

This time around (last night) was in the same room, in my bed, around the same time as the last quake, the same crack sound above me, and the bed swayed from side to side for about 5 to 10 secs, really weird feeling. I didn't get out of bed this time, I knew I'd be waking up to the news headlines after last time.

And yes. I'm in West London would you believe!

Cheers

EU to ban the patio heaters that ate the planet. Not.

Alex
Coat

Ban 'em

Hmm.. put on a jumper or put on a outside heater..put on a jumper or put on a heater..put on a jumper or put on a outside heater..put on a jumper or put on a heater..put on a jumper or put on a outside heater..put on a jumper or put on a heater.. urrghhh! I can't make the decision..... regulate it!

Seriously though, we don't need 'em anyway (jumpers I mean)....

UK military faces spectrum sell off

Alex

ZX81?

About time they updated their spectrums, those Sinclair machines are almost old hat nowadays.

DC Comics to kill off Batman?

Alex
Gates Halo

A new Batman?

Well it's time for batman of the future. Qualifications are rich, smart, gadgets everywhere, big mansion.

Come on guys, you know who it's going to be (hint see picture). Yes it's MS Batman!, and hopefully he will lock up i-pod users by the dozen for crimes commited again'st humanity (string 'em up by with their pathetic "please don't mug me" white wires.....

DVLA's 5m driver details giveaway

Alex
Paris Hilton

Out!

Where's the opt out? How do you do it?

Virgin Media network collapses nationwide

Alex

Still on Virgin? hahaha!

I left last week.... best thing I ever did... consistently fast speeds, much better network reliability. Frankly I recommend going anywhere other than virgin (they used to be OK until they introduced capping). I experienced very little downtime at all when transferring (I was down from for 30 mins from midnight on the day of transfer). My advice to those on virgin. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Get out!!!

BBC's iPlayer launches Christmas Day

Alex

Tomorrow

I leave virgin media and moving (hopefully) to a far better provider. So far the process has been simplicity itself.... the next 48 hours or so will prove the point.

I urge readers to dump virgin media ASAP. I was a happy customers of their up until Feb. It's just been my lazyness that I haven't changed till now. The service is appauling.

Where does Web 2.0 leave the BBC?

Alex

R-BBC?

Where would the register be without the BBC website? let's face it half the stories we've already read on bbc.co.uk? :)

Ian McKellen keen to reprise Gandalf

Alex

Another great tek story by the register

Keep it up guys! I look forward to the Star Wars, Star Trek updates, because lets face it... as nerds that's all we're interested in... :)

Kaspersky: Maxtor markets password-pilfering Dutch disk drives

Alex

Security?

The first thing I do with a new hard drive is get the hammer out, bash it one. Then I jump up and down it a few times.... If I'm feeling really comprehensive about it I connect it to a Mac ;)

The BBC iPlayer 'launch' that wasn't

Alex

Another comment

I've just read a lot of comment here about the quality and how rubbish it is. How the BBC have messed it up etc.

May I remind people this is (supposed to be anyway) BETA software.

If you don't like it right now.... well give feedback to the BBC. Don't complain though.... If you are annoyed then the solution is not to use BETA software.

When it gets properly released and it's still crap, well write to the BBC board of directors and accuse them of leftie/liberal bias or something.

Alex

I have my account and I signed up last Friday

That took just 5 days, and the reason why I signed up is because I read the hype. I should be waiting a lot longer than this shouldn't I? Or have the BBC decided to pretty much push it out now after the publicity it gained?

Twitchers in a flap over 'cock' gagging

Alex

My cock

I'd just like to say that I have a far larger cock than anybody who has bothered to post here. Hell inevitably somebody was going to post this, might as well get it out sooner rather than later...

Home Secretary bigs up fingerprint-activated iPods

Alex

Good idea!

Anybody who owns an i-pod, listening to compressed to f**k music with clinky cheap earphones (that look like 1970's deaf aids), bumping into people/walking into running cars, whilst thinking they look "cool", and carrying their mobile (which probably has a perfectly good MP3 player built in) deserves to be arrested and whipped.

So taking their fingerprints in advance is a good idea in my view. Now that we can't deport terrorists it's time to look at the next easy target!

A modern-day Gerstner is needed to cure all of Microsoft’s ills

Alex

Misplaced article

I'm not big MS fan but looking at the results they've done more OK! Article should have been written after the results, not before (waste of time).

Sinclair ZX Spectrum: 25 today

Alex

Get your history right!

Chuckie egg and elite were BBC micro games. Far superior than the ported Spectrum versions. I had both machines (sold my spec for a BBC micro B).

Four words for Spectrums.... ultimate play the game.. they pushed the boundaries with Knight Lore, Attic Attack, Jet-Pac, Alien-8. BBC micro users eventually got a port but by then it almost felt far too late.

And who remembers Psion flight simulator? With wonderful landscapes such as Lake round, etc.. loved that game.

AND the hobbit....! Oh no I'm thinking about middle earth.... what is going on? I'm begining to feel slightly smelly and unwashed.

Oh and the time I met Sir Clive... I was soooo excited...

My genitalia is definitely getting very small indeed thinking of all this, I'll leave the forum now before I geek myself to death and develop spots.

Microsoft Xbox 360 HD DVD player

Alex

PC compatibility

Hi

Could you extend this review? Apparently they work with PC's.

Would be good to hear about the ins and outs of that.

Cheers

Alex

Alex

Scratch that last comment

Clearly I can't read properly.

Thanks

Alex